Talk: Jan Smíšek (ESA and TU Delft) - Teleoperation and shared autonomy research at the ESA Telerobotic & Haptics Lab

Friday, 13. May 2016 - 10:00 to 11:00
We would like to invite you to a seminar given by our former grad student ('11), currently a research engineer at ESA and a Ph.D. student at TU Delft, The Netherlands. Seminar will take place in room K14 at Department of Control Engineering, Karlovo náměstí 13/E.

Abstract

The European Space Agency (ESA) is conducting research in developing technologies for future space exploration missions using remotely operated robots. Remote task execution principally offers two extremes for control of a teleoperated robot: a) direct tele-manipulation, which offers flexible task execution, but requires continuous attention of a human operator; b) and automation, which lacks flexibility but provides superior performance in predictable and repetitive tasks.

To give an overview on current state-of-the-art space tele-manipulation, the talk will present a series of recent flight experiments conducted by the ESA Telerobotics and Haptics laboratory. In these experiments, a variety of terrestrial robots were controlled by astronauts from on-board the International Space Station, communicating over a geostationary satellite relay network (with a loop time delay of 0.85 sec).

Moreover, this talk will explore a middle option between tele-manipulation and autonomy, termed haptic shared control, in which the control from the operator and from the automation is merged using haptic forces on a common control interface. Such design has the potential to overcome some of the human-machine interaction issues frequently associated with automated control systems, such as loss of skills and situational awareness of the operator.

Bio

Jan Smisek is a Robotics Engineer at the Telerobotics and Haptics lab, with the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) of the European Space Agency (ESA), situated in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. He is also a PhD candidate at the Control and Simulation department, Faculty of Aerospace EngineeringDelft University of Technology teaching Master's level control and human-machine interaction related courses. Jan received the MSc degree in Systems and Control from the Czech Technical University in Prague, in 2011.

We will be glad if you join the event on Facebooku.

Image taken from http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2013/03/Robotic_manipulator_in_T...(c) 2013 ESA/Guus Schoonewille.